Location: GSK HQ UK (Hybrid 2-3 days at HQ)
Reporting to : Head of Business Strategy and Operations
Business Introduction
GSK remains committed to achieving bold commercial ambitions for the future. By 2031, we aim to deliver £40 billion in annual sales, leveraging our existing strong performance momentum to significantly increase our positive impact on the health of billions of patients globally. Our Ahead Together strategy is centred on early intervention to prevent and alter the course of disease, thereby protecting people and supporting healthcare systems. Our diverse portfolio consists of vaccines, specialty medicines, and general medicines. Through continuous innovation and a dedicated focus on scientific and technical excellence, we strive to develop and launch new, groundbreaking treatments that address critical health challenges.
Role Purpose
The Business Effectiveness Director for GSK UK Commercial owns the UK commercial effectiveness and excellence agenda, translating UK business strategy into field-force strategies, performance frameworks, incentive plans, customer engagement models and technology-enabled ways of working. The role provides strategic leadership across sales force effectiveness, incentive compensation, CRM (including Veeva), commercial tools, performance management and data-driven decision-making for the UK customer-facing organisation including commercial, Medical and HVA.
Key Responsibilities:
Sales Force Effectiveness & Commercial Strategy (UK)
- Lead the UK Sales Force Effectiveness (SFE) strategy, ensuring the commercial organisation is structured and deployed to maximise impact with UK customers and healthcare stakeholders.
- Partner with UK senior Commercial leaders to translate business strategy, brand priorities and customer needs into effective field-force models and execution plans.
- Own UK sales-force sizing, segmentation and targeting, territory alignment and deployment, ensuring resources are focused on the highest-value and future-focused UK opportunities.
- Evaluate field-force productivity to improve call effectiveness, customer coverage, targeting and resource allocation across UK territories.
- Maintain frameworks to measure UK sales-force performance and productivity and provide strategic recommendations to senior leadership based on quantitative analysis, market insights and commercial performance.
- Establish clear, evidence-based governance around SFE decisions, aligned to UK business priorities.
- Deliver Excellence in Strategic account management in collaboration with the Business Units and establish infrastructure for continuous improvement and Account management level performance.
Medical Customer Facing Effectiveness:
- Partner with Medical Leadership to define and deliver customer-facing effectiveness strategies that optimise engagement, resource deployment and business impact.
- Act as the business owner for medical customer-facing platforms and capabilities, including Veeva SAM, Medical Insights and future digital engagement solutions, ensuring governance, adoption and continuous improvement.
- Lead the translation of Medical engagement data into actionable insights to support strategic decision-making and evidence-based customer engagement.
- Collaborate with Regional and Global teams to shape and influence future Medical effectiveness capabilities, ensuring UK business requirements are represented.
- Drive excellence in Veeva, AIM+ and leveraging medical insights and AI-enabled ways of working, ensuring high-quality insight generation and actionable decision-making.
- Working with the MSL leads, establish robust frameworks and KPIs, in alignment with region, to measure scientific engagement quality, medical insight impact, evidence generation effectiveness and contribution to patient outcomes.
- Champion an enterprise approach across Medical, Commercial and Access, creating a shared understanding of patient pathways, customer needs and healthcare system barriers to maximise patient and business impact.
- Any elevation of digital capability, if appropriate, to be leveraged across the functions.
Health Value & Access Customer Facing Effectiveness
- Partner with HVA leadership to develop and implement customer engagement and effectiveness strategies across Market Access field teams.
- Lead optimisation of targeting, customer planning, deployment and performance management approaches for HVA teams.
- Ensure customer-facing systems, data and reporting capabilities support HVA objectives whilst maintaining compliance with customer consent and engagement governance requirements.
Customer Facing Excellence Across All Functions
- Own and develop an integrated customer-facing effectiveness strategy across Commercial, Medical and HVA, ensuring consistent processes, tools, governance and performance standards.
- Act as the strategic lead for customer engagement excellence, embedding best practice and driving adoption of future ways of working across all customer-facing teams.
- Partner with business leaders to design future organisational capabilities and operating models that maximise customer impact and execution excellence.
UK Sales Incentive Compensation
- Own the strategy, design and governance of UK sales-force incentive compensation programmes.
- Partner with UK BUH’s, Finance, HR, Sales and Compensation & Benefits to project manage annual incentive plans (targets, measures, thresholds, accelerators and payout curves) aligned to UK objectives and market dynamics.
- Ensure plans are differentiated by role, customer segment and UK market context, and regularly review effectiveness, including behavioural impact, financial outcomes, fairness and unintended consequences.
- Lead the annual UK incentive planning cycle, supervising calculations, validation, reporting and issue resolution, and ensuring timely, clear communication to the field.
- Ensure programmes comply with GSK policies, governance requirements and applicable regulations in the UK operating environment.
- Working closely with Region/Global counterparts to ensure efficiency in design, planning, implementation and optimisation of SFE including platform and process synergies.
CRM, Veeva and Commercial Technology
- Act as senior business owner for Veeva CRM and other commercial technology platforms used by the UK field organisation, transforming Veeva from a transactional reporting system into a critical business enablement platform that supports decisions and execution, in close collaboration with the Digital and Tech Function.
- Enhance data inputs and outputs from Veeva to support insight-led strategies, campaign design and execution across UK brands and segments.
- Rapid adoption of Veeva AI in all aspects to drive UK commercial impact.
- Define and prioritise CRM requirements with UK Sales, Marketing, Medical, Digital & Tech and Insights team, leading continuous improvement of processes, workflows, dashboards, reporting and user experience.
- Drive high CRM data quality, adoption and governance, and use CRM data to improve targeting, call planning, customer engagement, activity management and performance visibility.
- Identify and introduce commercial tools, automation and digital capabilities that enhance UK field-force productivity, and lead business readiness, change management and adoption for major CRM or technology changes.
- Ensure UK technology investments are backed by clear business cases, measurable outcomes and appropriate governance.
Commercial Planning & Governance (UK)
- Lead or contribute to UK annual and longer-term commercial planning, ensuring SFE strategy, incentives, CRM capabilities and resources are aligned to UK business plans.
- Establish robust governance for SFE, incentives, CRM and commercial effectiveness initiatives.
- Prepare recommendations and decision papers for UK senior leadership forums.
- Maintain documentation, controls and auditability for critical commercial processes.
Leadership, Team & Cross-Functional Influence
- Lead, coach and develop a team of Business Effectiveness professionals, with clear objectives, accountabilities and development plans.
- Build a high-performing team culture focused on analytical rigour, commercial impact, collaboration and continuous improvement, balancing strategic leadership with operational oversight of UK deliverables. The team will be viewed as critical business partners offering proactive support to drive commercial impact.
- Act as a role model for GSK leadership behaviours and ways of working.
- Provide digital and AI transformational leadership, championing innovation and the use of advanced analytics, AI, automation and predictive modelling to improve UK commercial effectiveness.
- Build strong relationships across UK Commercial/Sales leadership, Marketing/Brand, Finance, HR, Data & Analytics, Digital & Tech, Medical, Compliance, Legal, as well as Global/Regional Commercial Excellence teams and external partners.
Data, Analytics & AI
- Define the customer-facing data and insight strategy across Commercial, Medical and HVA, ensuring alignment to business priorities and enterprise data governance requirements.
- Act as the primary interface between business functions, Business Insights, Digital and Tech Regional/Global teams to shape future data, reporting and AI-enabled capabilities.
- Establish governance for the appropriate use of data, AI, privacy and compliance requirements across all customer-facing effectiveness activities.
- Drive adoption of advanced analytics, AI and insight-led decision making to improve customer engagement, performance management and business outcomes.
Regional & Global Partnership
- Represent UK Commercial, Medical and HVA requirements within Regional and Global effectiveness forums.
- Influence the prioritisation, design and deployment of Regional and Global solutions to ensure they deliver measurable impact for UK business objectives.
- Lead local execution of Regional and Global initiatives whilst identifying opportunities to simplify processes and maximise adoption.
Experience & Qualifications
Essential:
- Proven experience in designing and managing sales force incentive compensation programmes.
- Significant experience of sales force deployment, territory alignment, segmentation, targeting, and productivity optimisation.
- Experience in pharmaceutical, healthcare, or other regulated industries.
- Significant experience with Veeva CRM or comparable CRM and broader commercial technology ecosystems.
- Demonstrated enterprise-level leadership, including setting a clear vision, driving cross-functional alignment, and influencing outcomes across multiple business units and senior stakeholders.
- Experience translating data and analytics into strategic commercial recommendations.
- Demonstrated experience in managing and developing teams.
- Strong financial and analytical skills, including business case development and evaluation of commercial ROI.
- Proven ability to operate effectively with senior stakeholders and influence leadership-level decisions.
- Strong project and programme management skills.
- Experience working in complex, matrixed organisations within pharma, healthcare, or life sciences.
Preferred Qualifications:
If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus:
- Degree or professional qualifications in business, operations, technology, data/AI, or a related discipline.
- Formal project or programme management qualification (e.g., PRINCE2 or PMP).
- Experience in Sales Force Effectiveness, Commercial Excellence, Business Effectiveness, Sales Operations, or similar commercial strategy functions.
- Strong background in change management, learning design, and adoption planning.
- Proven experience leading RFPs, managing vendor selection, and overseeing supplier performance frameworks.
- Hands-on experience integrating AI and automation into business processes.
Closing Date for Applications: 7th September 2026 (EOD)
Please take a copy of the Job Description, as this will not be available post closure of the advert. When applying for this role , please use the ‘cover letter’ of the online application or your CV to describe how you meet the competencies for this role , as outlined in the job requirements above. The information that you have provided in your cover letter and CV will be used to assess your application.
Skills
Business Alignment, Commercial Operations Management, Data to Insights, Digital Fluency, Scientific Literacy, Strategic Planning
Why GSK?
Uniting science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together.
GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of the decade, as a successful, growing company where people can thrive. We get ahead of disease by preventing and treating it with innovation in specialty medicines and vaccines. We focus on four therapeutic areas: respiratory, immunology and inflammation; oncology; HIV; and infectious diseases – to impact health at scale.
People and patients around the world count on the medicines and vaccines we make, so we’re committed to creating an environment where our people can thrive and focus on what matters most. Our culture of being ambitious for patients, accountable for impact and doing the right thing is the foundation for how, together, we deliver for patients, shareholders and our people.
GSK is an Equal Opportunity Employer. This ensures that all qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), parental status, national origin, age, disability, genetic information (including family medical history), military service or any basis prohibited under federal, state or local law.
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